Question

My sitemap.xml file is being indexed by google in SERP. How to stop it. Please Help

Answer 1

Unfortunately you pretty much can't, since Google needs to know about the file. To be honest it's Google being pretty stupid thinking that showing that file in SERPs is ever useful to end users.

One possibility is to use a gzipped file instead of XML, i.e. sitemap.xml.gz. You'd need to customize the sitemap plugin for that, though.

Answer 2

You can try robots.txt file. If you want google ignore your sitemap.xml, you can set some line in your robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /sitemap.xml

If you want google ignore your site, you can set for your robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Comments

robots.txt, not bobots.txt. I've to edit. Thanks!

---

If you do that then aren't you blocking Google from seeing the sitemap? Which totally defeats the purpose of having the sitemap.

Answer 3

You can use the X-Robots-Tag for non-HTML files like XML's, PDF's, .txt or image files where the usage of robots meta tags is not possible. Here's an example of adding a noindex X-Robots-Tag directive for XML files across an entire site:

<Files ~ "\.xml$">
  Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</Files>

You should add this code to .htaccess or httpd.conf file that are placed in public_html directory of Apache based web servers. This will prevent all .XML files from appearing in SERP's.